Between Home and Nature: Urban Political Ecology of Allotment Gardening in Post-socialist City and Its Urban Impacts

The project focuses on Prague allotments as an empirical example of the changing approach to urban nature and urban planning after the fall of socialism. Allotments represent spaces of affection and care. As urban nature, they are spaces of intense political negotiations. The project aims to analyse how allotments reflect changes in urban developments and nature, politics of urban space as well as the experience of the city and home. Combining the micro and macro perspective in a multi-method research (Burawoy’s (1998) extended case method), the project will (1) produce detailed understanding of practices/experiences of urban gardening and their changes in the transformation from socialism to post-socialism; (2) explore how changes in imaginaries and experiences of home, nature and the city manifest; and (3) analyse negotiations over the spaces of allotment gardening. The objective is to show how the transformation from socialism has affected the complexities of the politics of urban nature, and what its impact is on everyday experience of home and nature in the post-socialist city.

Goals:

To establish practices of urban gardening and their changes from socialism to post-socialism; to analyse how the changing practices reflect changing experience of home, nature and city; to provide an empirically based analysis of developments in the politics of urban nature over the given period.